937: TornadoGuard
| TornadoGuard |
 Title text: The bug report was marked 'could not reproduce'. |
Explanation
This is a comic with a take on an application store - the most common app stores are for iPhones and Android devices. The creator of this app is "DroidCoder2187", which implies that the app may be for Android devices.
App stores take all the reviews and average the ratings for the overall star rating. In this comic, we see why this is sometimes a bad idea. In this case, there are three 5 star reviews about the stability and user interface features of the app, left by users who actually never experienced its core functionality (simply because they never had a tornado since they got it); however, the only review related to whether the app really works is given the same weight as the others. Also see future comic 1098: Star Ratings.
The image text is funny because it is a note from the developer's bug report, which said they could not reproduce the error. Of course, they could only reproduce such a failure if there were a tornado coming towards their area. This is a fairly rare situation, especially in certain areas of the world. This lack of suitable testing conditions explains why the actual tornado-prediction portion of their code appears to be faulty.
Transcript
- (The comic is a single panel which resembles a reviews page for a mobile phone application)
- Application name: Tornado Guard
- Author: DroidCoder2187
- Description: Plays a loud alert sound when there is a tornado warning for your area.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. (Based on 4 reviews)
- User Reviews:
- Reviewer 1: <<Rated 5 stars>> Good UI! Many alert choices.
- Reviewer 2: <<Rated 5 stars>> Running great, no crashes
- Reviewer 3: <<Rated 5 stars>> I like how you can set multiple locations
- Reviewer 4: <<Rated 1 star>> App did not warn me about tornado.
- [The caption below the comic reads: The problem with averaging star ratings]
Trivia
- The "could not reproduce" reason was also dealt with in 583: CNR.
add a comment!Discussion
In this comic, the bug was that the speech recognition fails on a young child's voice. So the team attempts to reproduce a child in order to fix the bug and get the test subject. The bug report is closed as cannot fixed with the reason being 'could not reproduce'. 128.237.217.152 (talk) 19:40, 22 August 2012 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
And it's happened. See https://twitter.com/andymangold/status/341327603451441152/photo/1. Four-star rated "Tornado by American Red Cross" app, current top review reads "I did not find this app useful at all. There was a tornado watch for eight hours in my town, a tornado warning for 30 minutes, and there were no warnings or alerts visible on this app." 192.91.191.162 16:58, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
